I’ve been far under the weather for the better part of a week now, and it is quite tiresome. This is some nasty flu-ish bug. Not only do my sinuses feel like there are rabid weasels trying to eat their way out of my skull, but I am constantly fatigued – I slept off and on for over 18 hours yesterday.

Hell, I even took the day off of work on Thursday, thinking a day of nothing but sleep would do me some good. But this motherfucker is still lingering.

I’ve been loading up on Emergen-C three times a day, and I have drank my weight in NyQuil the last few nights(which always lends to bad-ass dreams of an almost opiate-like nature). My right ear, as it is wont to do when I am ill, is completely out of commission – everything sounds like it is underwater, and I have no balance due to my lack of an equilibrium.

All of this, while the talking heads on the news are talking about Snowmageddon hitting NYC tonight. AWESOME.

ANYWAYS…

As someone who loves Chuck Palahniuk’s early works(specifically his initial run of stories – Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Choke, & Survivor), I hate to say it, but I was totally let down by the movie version of Choke. Even after reading interviews with Palahniuk where he says he dug the film, I still feel a little cheated. I know, I am an asshole.

Maybe this is a bigger issue with me than I want to believe.

I get this way about a lot of shit. Like – what the fuck happened to Chris Cornell? Motherfucker used to have the best pipes in rock and motherfucking roll. Soundgarden was a beast of a band, with even that last lumbering effort, Down On The Upside having a lasting impression on my musical mind. The riffs. The melodies. It was still a damn fine album – no motherfucking Badmotorfinger, but really, what could ever top that?

And then Cornell goes on to front the remnants of Rage Against The Machine, under the poorly chosen moniker of Audioslave? Goddamn. Someone shoot me in the dick already. Audioslave was some terrible shit, man. It was like listening to two cats fucking outside a window(this coming from someone who has a HUGE soft spot for not only cats, but also both of the bands fused together to make Audioslave).

And then, after the Audioslave debacle is finally buried when RATM gets back together to play some shows during our election season(as if they wouldn’t!), Cornell goes out and does the unfuckingthinkable, and records a song for a fucking James Bond film? That’s akin to telling all of your former fans that you’ve cut your sac open and fed what was left of your testicles to a neighbor’s dementia-suffering grandmother. Let’s see…Bond film songs…Tina Turner. Duran Duran. Shirley Bassey. a-Ha. Paul McCartney & Wings. Sheena “My Vaginal Walls Are Coated In Glucose” Easton. Madonna.

Chris Cornell – lounge singer. And then he records an album with…

…wait for it…

Timbaland.

This is the same Chris Cornell who would fucking storm stages across the globe, screeching his heart out about how we all need to “Face Pollution”, or how he was “gonna break out of my rusty cage and run”. I am sure that Kim Thayil, Soundgarden’s irrevocably amazing guitar slinger(and the guy who once said – “I love dropped D tuning because it makes my guitar sound like dragon’s breath”) is sitting in his basement, polishing bullets with Cornell’s likeness engraved in the tips. No Soundgarden reunion, but you’ll record an album with motherfucking Timbaland?

FUCKING HELL, MAN.

Back to how this ties in somehow to me not digging Choke as a film…

It just didn’t have the right greasy feel to it. And by greasy, I mean lewd. Sure – Sam Rockwell wasn’t necessarily a bad choice to play a sex-addicted social miscreant who may or may not have been a product of the Vatican getting involved with infertility treatment. And Anjelica Huston was fantastic as his institutionalized nutcase of a mother. Actually – I had no real issues with the casting at all. Nor did I have any issues with the performances.

I guess I am just a dick. I just did not feel the movie the way I had hoped to. And this happens a lot – because we all end up developing these deeply personal relationships with characters and ideas set before us in “art” – you know? I went into viewing the film with the hope that it would be as entertaining as the book, which is something I always warn others about. And in this case, I was an idiot who let my guard down and hoped for a much more fleshed out version of my own inner version of Choke.